3 Apprentice

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2.5K Posts

March 12th, 2020 04:00

the bios , is not the limit (in fact BIOS likes your HDD even 100% erased, no formats of any kind)

your OS uses a driver, this driver talks directly to the SATA ports.  and BIOS is not even running,.

UEFI issues not with standing.....

you said ADD a drive must be the non boot drive, so just works for sure, just plug it , in SEE it does work

no need to fear plugging any empty, HDD, ever. just do it..  (empty = erased or  new )

when you boot the PC the BIOS scans the 2nd (1 example) HDD, and see the HDD report its ID page,PnP,

the BIOS sees what it is and reports it..(stores this PnP data) then the OS can see. later. (non boot drives)

3 Apprentice

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2.5K Posts

March 12th, 2020 04:00

there is no maximum,  it's like looking in Hubble and saying how far can we see.

there is a 2TB limit for MBR, (or tad more fiddling cluster sizes)

you PC running w10 -64bit,? 

The 64bit will format that drive (by default),  as GPT,  , even with my PC running legacy mode, not UEFI.

The GPT , limits do not reach max until the year 3000,(lol), if ever.. petabytes, are beyond human realities, now..

the old 8 year old 2012 manuals will show some silly limit that means (what they had at hand 8 years ago as a snap shot  in time)

I have ,3 drives, in mine and 5 total (+2SDD)

6TB + 3TB and one 6TB on running on my USB-C port (added)

the fastest HDD made in fact, Seagates !

for linux mostly the same thing but there are what 10,000 distributions of linux, so ,  be best to ask them or upgrade linux to newest kernel. (unbuntu v18?)  but I'd not expect any mondern linux to limit you  but then again

it has its own linux formats/

Linux has GPT and other sub  formats,  some even shared with Windows (not NTFS)

 

 

1 Rookie

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52 Posts

March 12th, 2020 07:00

Thanks, I'm running Openmediavault on the machine as a Plex server.  My boot drive is a 120GB SSD, but I have 2x 1TB, 2x 4TB and 1x 8TB connected right now.  I'll need another SATA controller to add another drive, but wanted to make sure it would work before buying another card.  Sounds like I should be good to go since I still have a PCIe x4 slot available for the controller. 

9 Legend

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47K Posts

March 14th, 2020 18:00

Anything more than 2TB requires GPT Partition.

NON UEFI systems cannot boot larger than 2TB drives.

https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/beyond-2tb/

1 Message

July 2nd, 2023 08:00

Come people please answer this question. It is rapidly coming up to its third birthday. What is the point of having this chat if the owner has to wait three years?

 

Come on pleople

9 Legend

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8.3K Posts

July 2nd, 2023 12:00

It'd been answered.  Did you missed it?  There is no HDD size limit in BIOS of OptiPlex 7010.

OP already marked accept as solution, meaning the 12TB worked with OP's 7010.

 

1 Rookie

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1 Message

January 15th, 2026 22:50

@Chino de Oro​ My PC is optiplex 7010 micro plus, and it's not accepting more than 2tb external hard drive what can be done in my case 

9 Legend

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8.3K Posts

January 16th, 2026 09:04

Re: My PC is optiplex 7010 micro plus, and it's not accepting more than 2tb external hard drive what can be done in my case.

You can open new thread and providing more info about system OS, connection ports, and how you tested external drives.

 

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